Mountain Lion Features You May Have Missed | From The Archives: Watch Yammer's First Public Demo And Launch At TC50 | For brands on Facebook - 6 ways to push beyond the ?Like? | How crowdfunding could revolutionize solar | Review: MacBook Pro with Retina Display Redefines the Concept of a 'Pro' Laptop

Way back in 2008, Yammer made its first public appearance at the TechCrunch TC50 conference. David Sacks, who introduced himself as the CEO of the genealogy siteGeni, not Yammer, gave an 8 minute demo of the new product. He finished the demo by flipping the switch and officially launched Yammer to customers. Less than 4 years later, Yammer appears close to a $1.4 billion exit and purchase by Microsoft.In this video captured via Ustream, Sacks explained how he came up with the idea:“I’m David Sacks, and I’m the CEO of a company called Geni doing a startup with about 30 employees. And we needed to find a way to stay connected as a company. And we looked for something[...]

Smart marketers are putting a lot of thought into how to get their brands ?Liked? on Facebook. But what happens after the Like?You may be pushing out content to your followers, but with the clutter and limited shelf-life of the feed, are your efforts really paying off? Are you really connecting with your audience?Here are six ways to build up the engagement with your brand?s community of followers::1. Maximize fan value. Drink maker Red Bull is the gold standard here. It created a new content category (extreme sports) that one could argue didn?t exist at scale prior to them focusing on it.�Red Bull is a modern media company that, oh yeah, happens to sell beverages. The company?s X-Games C[...]

If just one percent of retail investments in savings accounts, money markets and U.S Treasuries was put into crowdfunding of solar projects — that can provide a 5 to 9 percent return to the investor — then that would deliver more than $90 billion for the creation of clean energy projects, according to a new white paper from Bloomberg.The idea behind this emerging sector is that investing in the construction of putting solar panels on rooftops can provide a relatively low risk return on the upfront investment. Building owners generally lease solar equipment and enter into a contract to pay a fixed, low, electricity rate, commonly over about two decades. Over the past several year[...]